Littleton school bought for farm museum

LITTLETON – It has been two years since the final bell rang at the Littleton Elementary School and pupils left the school for the last time.

SAD 29 closed the school in June 2000 after enrollment dwindled and townspeople voted to shut down the facility.

Today, there is a mustiness in the air and voices echo off the walls, now devoid of the colorful bulletin boards and displays of children’s artworks that had adorned them for 50 years.

But there is still life in the old school. With the presentation Saturday of a loan check in the amount of $50,000 from Katahdin Trust Co., members of the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum committee officially marked their purchase of the 13,000-square-foot school.

Residents approved the sale of the school for the museum last year at town meeting.

The intention now is to use the half-dozen classrooms, as well as some of the 8 acres, to develop a museum to preserve the region’s agricultural heritage.

“This is the first milestone,” said Francis Fitzpatrick, president of the group that has been discussing a museum since the mid-1980s. He said that to many people, the idea of a museum was only a dream, and without a building, it would never come to fruition.

“We needed an identity to prove to people that the project is a reality,” he said.

The museum is already well on its way to filling the old classrooms, thanks to the pending donation of thousands of items by Cedric Shaw of Littleton, who for the past 14 years has turned his barn and other farm buildings into a one-man museum show of the region’s agricultural history.

Because of his generosity, the museum officially will be known as the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum, Cedric Shaw Collection, according to Charles Upton, the organization’s vice president. “It was his collection that really brought this thing to a head,” he said.

For Shaw, 86, who is a member of the museum committee, the new museum is a continuation of what he began in 1988. With no family in the area to take over from him, he said, it was only logical that much of what he has collected would go into the new museum.

“I approve of it 100 percent,” he said on Saturday. “I’m really excited about this.”

Upton said others in the area have been collecting tools, farm equipment and other items for years waiting for a place to put them on display.

He added that eventually the museum would include a storage shed for large machinery exhibits, as well as a restoration shop where equipment can be rebuilt for exhibition.

A key goal of the museum committee is to retain the building’s use as a source of education.

“We think there are age groups that should know that there wasn’t always a computer in the room,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s a lot of people, a lot of educators, who could utilize the museum as an educational tool.”

It is that educational element that has prompted the committee to begin negotiations with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension to relocate the museum.

In that way, Upton said, people can learn about the way agriculture and rural life used to be and learn about modern trends in farming all at one site.

“We believe that a museum needs to be an educational institution,” he said. “We don’t want to be an attic where people just put things.”

While much of the building will be devoted to the museum, the large gym and kitchen will still be available for use by the community for functions and meetings, Fitzpatrick said.

The museum committee meets at 9 a.m. on the first and third Saturdays of each month at the museum on U.S. Route 1. Meetings are open to the public. For more information, people can call Fitzpatrick, Upton or Barry Campbell, the organization’s treasurer.